The European Parliament this week passed a major piece of telecom reform that …

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France's much talked about "three strikes" law receive a spirited non! from the European Parliament this week, but French and EU officials are already claiming that the vote won't ultimately impact so-called "graduated response" schemes.

The EU Parliament voted Wednesday to pass the "Telecom Package," a major overhaul of European telecom rules that will turn the entire region into a single market for the purposes of selling mobile, landline, and Internet services. The goal is to bring down costs for consumers by breaking through national barriers that were keeping prices high, but the package of new rules quickly became mired in fights over ISP filtering and graduated response rules in which copyright infringers could be booted from the 'Net after three violations.

Hundreds of amendments were tabled, making the entire legislative process difficult to follow, but two of the key changes proposed were Amendments 133 and 138. As the UK's Open Rights Group points out, 133 would have prevented EU countries from requiring local ISPs to filter content.

Guy Bono

138, introduced by a French Socialist MEP Guy Bono (who gets extra points in our book for that moustache) would have prevented any action against Internet users without prior judicial intervention. In other words, Bono insisted that courts need to be involved in any disconnection procedure—exactly the sort of slow process backers of graduated response plans hope to avoid.

133 failed in the voting, but 138 passed by a substantial majority. The bill goes on to the various EU countries for approval, but as passed, it appears to cause real problems for the French three strikes proposal, which has yet to be implemented.

It was only a matter of hours before the spin began. Interest in this question is obviously keen in France, and papers like Libérationwent to the French government for a response. The Minister of Culture, Christine Albanel, told the paper that amendment 138 would probably turn out to have no real bearing on France's proposed three strikes rule.

Viviane Reding

Why not? The answer became clear when EU Commissioner Viviane Reding, who spearheaded the telecom reforms, announced her hope to force the removal of the amendment by the Commission. Advocacy group La Quadrature du Net (Squaring the Net) called this unacceptable, saying that it was "a completely unsuitable request from Mrs. Reding, under the basic democratic principle recalled in the amendment (i.e. the separation of powers), but also under the parliamentary plebiscite it collected (574 MEPs for, 73 against)."

The group urged readers to contact their own governments and the European Commission over the matter.

Graduated response isn't simply a French governmental idea, of course, but one backed by Big Content. The IFPI, music's international trade group, regularly talks up the wonders of the approach and the success it has had around the world to date. While graduated response does have significant benefits over, say, the RIAA's litigation campaign, it also raises due process concerns of the kind that the Bono amendment tried to address.

Bono, writing on his website yesterday, says he is outraged at Reding's proposed deletion of his amendment. Roughly translated, Bono wrote that Reding's position "is all the more regrettable and shameful in that it tries to defeat a plan passed by a very large majority (573 for, 74 against) in a democratic assembly, elected by European citizens."

The official EU press release touting the bill's passage talks up all sorts of reforms, though it says nothing about three strikes issues. Even without the 138 amendment, however, the bill does nothing to require graduated response rules; it simply allows the possibility that they can be adopted by national governments (earlier analysis of the bill by advocacy groups was a bit overwrought on some of these points).

The Parliament won't be thrilled about this attempt to rewrite its work, though, as MEPs also voted on the graduated response issues earlier this year and also rejected it then. That vote was nonbinding, but it does indicate the seriousness with which the issue is being handled in Europe.